Team

Robyn Scott

Prior to Apolitical, Robyn co-founded OneLeap, an executive education company, and a Southern African non-profit teaching coding to vulnerable youth. She has written an acclaimed memoir and is an ambassador for the Access to Medicine Index, an advisor to the Responsible Mining Index, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a Gates Scholar. She has a BSc in Bioinformatics from Auckland University and a Masters in Bioscience Enterprise from Cambridge.

Lisa Witter

Lisa Witter is an award-winning executive, entrepreneur, author and public speaker. For more than 25 years she’s been working at the intersection of business, policy, government and behavioral science. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and served three terms on the Forum’s council on Behaviour and now co-chairs the Agile Governance Global Future Council. She’s sat on numerous boards including a publicly traded company and one for the U.S’. National Academy of Science and Engineering.

Nitika Agarwal

Nitika was formerly a senior policy advisor at ​the UK Government’s Treasury​. She has advised ministers on financial and budgetary policy, led negotiations in Brussels on the UK​’s behalf, served as Chief of Staff to the UK Ambassador to the EU, and driven commercial reforms in the public sector. She has also worked in India and France with human rights NGOs and holds a degree in PPE from Oxford University.

Ella Mae Lewis

Ella Mae was previously with the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, where she ran the Africa data, fieldwork and solutions portfolio. She also worked for the Walk Free Foundation, and with members of both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. She holds an MA in History from Oxford and taught herself to code. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Future Stars of Tech Award, and 2018 Digital Leaders Women in GovTech.

John Field

John is a hands-on technical leader, veteran engineer, mentor, and architect, with particular interests in modern agile approaches and emergent organisational processes. He brings to Apolitical over 20 years cross-sector experience in software engineering and related activities, including for BBC Studios and Alexander Street Press. He holds a BSc (Hon.) in Applied Physics and MSc Internet Systems, both from the University of Portsmouth, and tries to stick to an "only the one bookcase" rule.

Advisors

Paul Kirby

Advisor

Paul Kirby is a non-executive director of the UK Cabinet Office and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously Paul served as Partner and Global Head of the Government and Public Sector Practice at KPMG and Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit. He studied at Oxford University.

Professor Steven Pinker

Advisor

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and Johnstone Professor at Harvard University. He has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” His tenth book, published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Sheila Lirio Marcelo

Advisor

Sheila Lirio Marcelo is the Founder, Chairwoman and CEO of care.com; a public company that is the world’s largest online care destination with 20.7 million members in 18 countries. Sheila frequently speaks about women, technology and leadership, and has presented alongside former US President Barrack Obama. Sheila has been named a ‘Top 10 Women Entrepreneur’ by Fortune, is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and was recently appointed to the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership. She graduated from Mount Holyoke, where she also holds an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, and received her JD/MBA from Harvard University.

Lindiwe Mazibuko

Advisor

Lindiwe Mazibuko is the first black woman in South African history to be elected Leader of the Opposition in Parliament. At 31 she was elected to be her party’s youngest ever parliamentary leader. She successfully prosecuted a Constitutional Court case against the Speaker of the National Assembly that vindicated the right of Members of Parliament to move a motion of no confidence in the President. She studied at Cape Town and Harvard University and was a Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

Dr Adam Parr

Advisor

Dr Adam Parr is an entrepreneur and investor based in Oxford. He chairs the Oxford University machine-learning spin-out, Mind Foundry, and is a director of Cosworth Group and an advisor to OneLeap. Adam raised the finance for Ingenie.com and QuantumBlack, start-ups respectively acquired by Watchstone Group and McKinsey & Co. A barrister by training, he served as chief executive and chairman of the Williams F1 team between 2006 and 2012. He is a graduate of Cambridge University and holds a PhD from University College London.

H.R.H. Jaime de Bourbon de Parme

Advisor

H.R.H. Jaime de Bourbon de Parme is currently Senior Advisor Private Sector Partnerships at the UNHCR, and the former Netherlands’ Ambassador to the Holy See. Previously, Jaime was the Special Envoy on Natural Resources at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His main focus was long-term and sustainable security of supply of energy, metals and minerals. In this capacity he initiated the Responsible Mining Index. He set up the Conflict Free Tin Initiative, which brings traceable minerals from conflict prone areas in Congo to the international market. He also brokered a deal with Bolivia, which has the greatest deposits of lithium in the world, to help industrialise their lithium sector.

Alex Lovell-Troy

Advisor

Alex Lovell-Troy is an experienced entrepreneur and technology advisor with organizations including NewsDeeply, OneLeap and the William James Foundation. He is currently a Cloud Architect at Cray, and former Vice President of Transformation with Pythian where he lead strategy and analytics consulting practices. As advisor to Apolitical, he guides strategic use of data and technical leadership.